


Time Flies

by firbolg_boyfriends



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (and just a touch of angst), Baking, Domesticity, Fluff, Gen, Grocery Shopping, Humor, M/M, Team as Family, gentle comforting vibes, immortals are bad with technology, nicky and joe are very very in love, the sweet old married couple energy is off the charts, there's a stray cat that they feed
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-30
Updated: 2020-09-24
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:47:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,927
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25606831
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firbolg_boyfriends/pseuds/firbolg_boyfriends
Summary: Nile and Andy could really use a break, so instead of diving into combat training they decide to go stay with Nicky and Joe at their apartment in southern Spain. Despite their extraordinary lives, Nicky and Joe's days are still filled with ordinary joys - cooking together, soaking up sunlight, falling more in love each day. It's possible, Nile realizes, that immortality doesn't have to be so daunting. (And maybe she's still surrounded by family, after all.)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache the Scythian & Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, past Andy/Quynh
Comments: 80
Kudos: 506





	1. Solo

**Author's Note:**

> hi wow I'm already back with another old guard fic <3 please enjoy!

"It's hell on Earth and the city's on fire / Inhale, in hell there's heaven"  
\- Frank Ocean, 'Solo'

Nile had gotten her first-ever mobile music device – a bright orange three-year-old iPod Nano – as a hand-me-down from her cousin the same year that Frank Ocean released Channel Orange, fittingly enough. She’d spent many a summer afternoon lying on the dingy living room carpet under the flickering light of the ceiling fan, listening to 'Lost' and 'Thinkin Bout You' and 'Bad Religion' over and over again, her young heart unable to directly relate to the lyrics but moved by the indescribable emotions conveyed therein. The music unlocked something in her that she couldn’t put into words. When his second LP came out it quickly became her other favorite album, and as time carried on she began to designate specific songs of his that she listened to when she was in even more specific moods.

She didn’t have a song yet for this mood, though. It was hard to find lyrics that tapped into the ethos of becoming functionally immortal.

The team was taking a break between missions. Nicky and Joe had gone to one of their homes for the next few months and Andy had escorted Nile elsewhere for combat training, but it had only taken a couple of weeks for Andy to decide that doing martial arts on a windswept hillside in Scotland wasn’t accomplishing much of anything in terms of healing the bruises on Nile’s heart. “Let’s go stay with Nicky and Joe for a while,” she’d said. “They like company, anyway.”

She hadn’t really articulated why they were going, but Nile didn’t need her to. She felt like she got it. She couldn’t make up her mind about whether she was more ashamed or relieved.

Nicky and Joe had a few different homes around the world, which they routinely sold once they’d owned them for a suspiciously long time. They generally didn’t live in the same cities twice, according to Andy, but they’d come back to Cádiz a few times over the course of the last millennium because there was something about it that appealed to them. It was old, for one thing – not as old as Andy, but old enough that it had already been old when Nicky and Joe were born, which felt refreshing to them. It was built on a sand spit extending from the southernmost point of Spain – practically an island, connected only to the mainland by a narrow strip of estuary. A marble-domed cathedral looked out over a cobalt bay, pearlescent spires encircled by the wheeling paths of seagulls. The people spoke a rustic accent with incomprehensible slang terms and consonants that melted into following vowels, and most of their ancestors had fished in the same waters and lived on the same ground and breathed the same salty air thousands of years ago. It was the sort of place where immortals fit right in.

Their apartment had a guest room that they’d made up for Nile, with mismatched thrift-store furniture and an assortment of Joe’s sketches pinned to the wall. Andy slept on the pullout couch in the living room, but most nights Nile went to bed before she saw Andy come home. She wasn’t sure what Andy did all day. Train, probably. Kick things. Shoot other things. Brood about her past.

Nicky and Joe took Nile out for gelato to celebrate her coming to stay with them. Apparently, this particular gelatería had been here long enough that they’d had the opportunity to try every flavor. (Fortunately, the employee turnover rate was high enough that nobody had picked up on their lack of visible aging.) “Let’s get pistachio,” Nicky said brightly. “I haven’t had pistachio since the 80’s.”

“Anything for you, habibi,” Joe replied with a smile. When they weren’t in any kind of combat scenario they had even more attention to devote to their affection for one another. Nile couldn’t help but find it endearing that they still felt moved to flirt after nine-hundred years. Instead of buying two gelato cups, they shared one flavor like teenagers on a date.

“What would you like, Nile?” Nicky asked. “Lavender flavor is very good.”

“It tastes like soap,” Joe stage-whispered, and Nicky shook his head fondly, mouthing, ‘don’t listen’.

Nile smiled despite herself, and her heavy mood lifted ever-so-slightly. She hadn’t really wanted to get gelato in the first place – it made her think of her brother and how he’d always liked frozen yogurt, and thinking about her brother made her want to curl into a fetal position on top of her bedcovers and listlessly stare at the wall. She told herself she would rally, though. She would get gelato with Nicky and Joe, and she would put on a happy face. It was better than doing unspeakably brutal core-strength drills with Andy, at any rate.

She peered at the array of pastel-colored bins of gelato. Listened to the hum of the freezer and the low buzz of locals chattering in Spanish and tourists chattering in French. Smelled the icy-sweet pistachio fragrance of Nicky and Joe’s selection. And it was all… overwhelming. It was a lot. She didn’t know why, because it shouldn’t be. The scene was idyllic, theoretically. She couldn’t get it together. Inside her head she was curled on that bed, staring at the wall.

“Nile?” Nicky prompted gently.

“Would you like to try some of ours?” Joe asked, offering her a spoon.

For some unfathomable reason, their compassion was making a lump rise in her throat. She nodded wordlessly. Nicky handed her a spoonful of pistachio gelato. Joe rubbed her back, guiding her to a table.

“It’s okay, you know, to not be used to it yet,” Nicky told her mildly. “It took us a long time.”

“It is a lot to process,” Joe nodded.

The gelato was delicious, cool and sweet and creamy-soft as a dream. She savored it in her mouth, absorbing the nutty flavor, and swallowed carefully, slowly, closing her eyes. “I’m… okay,” she said, opening them again.

They didn’t reply. Their faces weren’t pitying, or frustrated, or confused. Just patient and kind. Something within her unfolded – brittle like paper, but unmistakably more open. “Thanks, guys,” she said, very quietly.

Nicky smiled. “We are going to make sure you have a nice time here, Nile.”

“You deserve it.” Joe reached out to squeeze one of her hands. After a moment’s hesitation, she squeezed back.

They bought her another cup of pistachio, and she finished all of it.

&

Running errands with Nicky and Joe was not entirely unlike running errands with her grandparents when she was a child. They always wanted to go early in the morning (‘while the air is fresh’, whatever that meant) and then be back in time for lunch – often quite literally, because a theoretically short trip could be made exponentially longer by Joe’s propensity for making small talk with cashiers and Nicky’s love of taking a circuitous walking route ‘to look at the flowers’ and both of their tendencies to remember that they also had to go to the bakery or the pharmacy or the janky ‘technology store’ when they were already on their way home from the supermarket.

“Joe will throw a fit if we don’t remember to get the shampoo he likes,” Nicky would say lightheartedly, and Nile would think longingly of the air-conditioned kitchen where her leftovers were waiting in the fridge. And then they would get all the way home and remember that they hadn’t bought eggs, which was most of the reason they’d gone out to begin with. “Oh well, we’ll get them next week,” Joe would say uncaringly, and proceed to make fried rice for breakfast for the next several days. They appeared to have a mostly random pattern of assigning importance to daily tasks that was subject to change on the barest whim. Nile supposed that was what it was like when you were a thousand years old. Things were priorities if you felt like they were, and then they weren’t anymore if you didn’t.

“Nile, come with me to the technology store,” Nicky had said that morning, shrugging on a coat that she was pretty sure belonged to Joe. She wasn’t sure whether they wore the exact same clothing size, but if they didn’t, the difference was minor enough that they shared garments more often than not either deliberately or accidentally. For people who’d been basically married for several hundred years, it probably didn’t matter much whose clothing was technically whose.

The ‘technology store’ was a tiny shop in a narrow alleyway between two irregularly-shaped plazas that sold – from what Nile could tell – secondhand and off-brand gadgets. There was a plastic bin filled with USB drives of every size, color, and shape, cell phones mass-produced by an mid-tier Chinese corporation, keyboards that were practically vintage, cheap headphones that would probably sound staticky after a month, and every imaginable type of cable except for the one you actually needed (which you would only ever discover after spending the better part of an hour trying to convey to the shopkeeper what exactly you were looking for). It was where most of the old people in town went to buy disposable cameras and have their cracked screens repaired. (Nicky and Joe were the oldest people in town.) (Excluding Andy.)

“Why are we going to the technology store?” Nile asked, rummaging in the closet for a jacket.

“Just take one of Joe’s,” Nicky said, seeing what she was doing. “And we are going because Joe needs a new electric cable.”

Nile frowned. “What? Should we call an electrician?”

“No, it’s a –” Nicky paused to let Nile through the apartment door, chewing his lip thoughtfully. “It is, like, to charge his phone, electronically.”

“Oh, a charging cable.”

“Yes, that. His phone ran out of charge a week ago and he has not refilled it yet because the cable is gone.”

Nile stared at him as she started down the stairs. “He hasn’t been able to use his phone all week? Why haven’t I heard about this?”

“He was borrowing my phone. But then I was at the market and I thought that I wanted to call him, but I couldn’t because he had my phone, and I thought, ‘This will not do, we have to get his phone back.’” He laughed, and the sun lit his face as they reached the foyer and stepped out into the street. The cobblestones were still damp from being washed by the street cleaners late last night, and pigeons fluttered down from the eaves to peck at the ground. “Isn’t that strange? For most of our lives we just accepted that we could not talk to each other if we were not in the same place. How the world changes.”

He started down the street, gesturing at her to follow. The streets in Cádiz were like canyons, light and shadow carved by the sand-colored façades of three- or four-storey buildings that stretched up to a glistening slice of blue sky. They wound and connected at odd angles, less like a maze and more like two different mazes drawn on top of each other, cutting haphazardly through each other’s paths, but fortunately if you wandered around for more than a few minutes you’d inevitably be poured out onto a wide, smooth-stoned market street brimming with loud-voiced pedestrians or one of several sunlit plazas lined with wrought-iron benches, umbrella’d outdoor tables, and sometimes a fountain named after a saint or a famous general. There were always more pigeons than people everywhere you looked, and in the sunnier spots there were orange trees whose fruit she’d been warned not to eat because it was ‘very sour’. Delicately painted ceramic placards on the sides of buildings denoted street names at every intersection, although Nile could swear that the street names sometimes changed after a few blocks of going in the same direction.

Not eager to spend the next hour and a half rummaging through the dimly lit shelves of the technology store, Nile convinced Nicky that Joe could have her backup cable and they should just skip the store and go straight to grocery-shopping, to which he agreed, to her relief. They wandered through the Plaza de Flores with its riotously colorful bouquets and neatly arranged potted succulents, past the ridiculously grandiose post office with its mail slots in the mouths of metal lions, around the steaming outdoor churro stands. (“Should we get some churros to bring to Joe?” Nicky mused. “I think he’ll be okay if we don’t,” Nile assured him, wanting to expedite things.)

Cádiz had a market – the sort of thing that might be called a farmers’ market in the US – where one could buy fresh ears of corn and every imaginable type of sausage and even an enormous, bloody swordfish head, laid like a gory spoil of war next to the icy, pristine corpses of a mind-bogglingly diverse array of marine life. But it was only open once a week at certain hours, and so the rest of the time people went to the supermarket chain that was right next to it. The food was more expensive and less fresh, but you could find popular brand-name items from America and Italy and you could also buy toothbrushes and tea towels along with your bread and oranges.

“These apples are so beautiful. Look how shiny they are. This one is like a rosy cheek,” Nicky said admiringly, placing it in a plastic bag.

“What do we need to buy? Do you have a list?” Nile asked, absently picking up an avocado and feeling it for ripeness.

Nicky hummed thoughtfully. “I think Joe said that he wanted bananas. And they are good for his digestive system, too.” He selected a bunch of bananas bound in plastic ribbon and placed them in the cart hanging from his arm like a flower basket. “They will look so nice in a bowl on the table, too. Maybe Joe can paint them. He paints sometimes,” he told Nile offhandedly, as if she might not have noticed the canvasses leaning against walls in the corners of the living room and laundry area.

She smiled fondly to herself. “Yeah, but do we need, like, pasta? Or bread? Milk? Any staples?”

Nicky paused. An old lady eyed him irritably, clearly waiting for him to move so she could reach the tomatoes. “Joe probably knows. We should call him. Oh, he has the phone, though. My phone.”

“We can use my phone,” Nile said, removing it from her pocket. “Do you wanna FaceTime him?”

Something she’d noticed about Joe and Nicky was that they enjoyed looking at each other, the way one would admire a nice painting on the wall of one’s house or a pleasant view through the window. More than once, she’d caught each one of them just staring happily at the other, who was busy washing dishes or folding laundry or making a sandwich. Occasionally they lapsed into simply looking at each other in fond silence, which Nile always wanted to leave the room for. (It would honestly feel less intimate to walk in on them heatedly making out on the sofa.)

“FaceTime?” Nicky frowned, puzzled. The old lady cleared her throat and Nile gently but firmly ushered him toward the candy aisle.

“Yeah, like, calling someone on video? So you can see their face?” Nile prompted. It would never cease to amuse her how the other immortals’ understanding of modern technology varied wildly depending on how useful it was in combat. Nicky, Joe, and Andy knew how to use modern weapons, but they were more than likely to pull swords and axes out during a fight, and they were also barely able to grasp the general concept of social media. (Thank God for Copley’s talents, really.)

“Here, let me show you,” she said, dialing Joe’s contact. If Nicky didn’t know about FaceTime it was doubtful that Joe did, but she hoped he was at least sapient enough to accept the call.

Fortunately, after a few rings, he did. “Habibi!” he said excitedly as soon as his face filled the screen. “And Nile! Are you out shopping?”

“I can see him! He’s right there!” Nicky whispered, as though Joe was a rare variety of bird he’d spotted in a nearby tree. “How lovely to see your face,” he said to Joe, leaning towards the phone so that Joe could hear him better, ostensibly.

“We were just wondering if you knew what we need to get from the store,” Nile said.

“Hmm, let me look in the kitchen,” Joe said. The view swung wildly as he stood and walked away from what appeared to be the area Joe and Nicky called ‘the terrace’ – glass doors in the living room that opened onto an infinitesimal strip of tile bound by railing, which Joe and Nicky habitually propped open with a pair of rickety lawn chairs. (Recently they’d added a wobbly footstool to the array so Nile could join them if she chose.) The view was of the street three storeys below, their neighbors’ laundry hanging to dry, and sometimes other people’s apartments if they left the curtains open and the lights on. Nicky and Joe liked to sit there with their drinks and talk about things that happened five hundred years ago, sometimes in languages that hadn’t been spoken for three hundred years.

“It’s like we are riding in his pocket,” Nicky whispered to Nile.

Joe hummed as he opened all the cabinets one by one. “We could use more pasta,” he remarked.

“That’s what I thought, too,” Nile commented.

“And we’re low on oil. Another bottle, perhaps.”

“Which kind?” Nicky asked.

“Just get olive oil, my love. And hurry back soon. It is very boring here without your hands to hold.”

“You can see my face, though, and hear my voice,” Nicky replied with an adoring smile.

“It’s true, but I miss touching your body –”

Nile laughed, rolling her eyes. “All right, I’ve heard enough. We’ll see you soon, Joe.”

They hung up and then they meandered around the store in search of a highly specific brand of olive oil that Nicky swore up and down must be here because he’d gotten it here before (“I might be thinking of a different country, though”). Then he decided somewhat spontaneously that he wanted to find a gift for Joe. Apparently, Joe and Nicky gave each other gifts from time to time on a fairly random basis. They didn’t remember their anniversary, they’d never known the exact dates of their birthdays, and they predated modern Valentine’s Day and Christmas celebratory customs, so instead of setting aside a particular occasion for extravagant gift exchange they simply bought things for each other or brought home found objects whenever the whim moved them. The apartment was decorated with odd-looking antique brooches and yellowed vintage postcards they’d discovered at Cádiz’s Sunday morning flea market and interesting rocks and shells they’d collected from the beach.

At this point, Nicky and Nile’s adventure in the supermarket revolved almost exclusively around Nicky trying to choose which cookie option Joe would enjoy the most. (“I think he’d like any of them,” Nile reasoned, to which Nicky responded that they had to find the one he would like better than the others.) Nile encouraged him to keep looking for the olive oil while he decided. Presently, they found their way into the home goods aisle, where Nicky peered at the shelves of utensils and, moments later, began inexplicably cracking up.

“What’s so funny?” Nile asked, starting to smile purely at how badly Nicky was losing it.

It took him a moment to regain his composure. “It’s just –” he wheezed and then doubled over in laughter. Unable to form words, he held up the package he was holding: a set of tiny silverware. For decorative purposes, probably. They looked a bit like the sample spoons at the gelatería.

Nile raised her eyebrows, laughing incredulously. “What – tiny spoons? What’s so funny about that?”

“They’re just – it’s just –” Nicky dissolved into giggling again and flapped his hand. “Call Joe again! He’ll want to see this!”

Perplexed but amused by Nicky’s incomprehensible sense of humor, Nile obliged and, after a ring, held her phone screen up so Joe could see Nicky holding the spoons. Almost immediately, uproarious laughter echoed from the speaker. Nile still didn’t get what was so funny. “I don’t understand!” she said, laughing herself. “Why are those spoons making you guys lose your shit?”

“They’re just – like, they’re – they’re –” Now Joe was unable to form words, too. Nile shook her head, bewildered.

Nicky decided to get the spoons and bring them back as a gift for Joe. Joe was delighted, kissing both his cheeks and lifting him in a hug. “They’re so funny!” he exclaimed.

Nile noted another consequence of being in love with the same person for nine hundred years: finding the same arbitrary things hilarious in a way that made little sense to anyone else. Even though she still didn’t get the joke, it warmed her that they did.

&

Joe and Nicky both cooked, but Joe enjoyed it more. When it was his turn to make dinner he began meal prep hours in advance, letting meat marinate in a crockpot, cutting up vegetables in specific ways and storing them in separate Tupperware containers, setting dishes of spices on the kitchen windowsill to ‘absorb the sunlight’. He sang songs in Arabic and Italian and absentmindedly swung his hips as he whisked sauces in a glass bowl cradled in the crook of an arm or stirred alliums and oils in a frying pan or scrubbed plates clean in the sink after a meal. He gave Nile and Nicky tastes of what he was making at every stage of production, and then before they sat down to eat the fully prepared meal he provided a poetically articulated speech about the history of the meal and its ‘emotional meaning’ and why he’d chosen this specific wine to go with it, to an audience of a raptly listening Nicky and a generally-interested-but-also-very-hungry Nile. (And from time to time, a fairly openly impatient Andy.)

Nicky occasionally helped him in the kitchen, but Joe mostly took his presence as an opportunity to rhapsodically reminisce about a time they’d eaten this dish together two centuries ago, make suggestive jokes about the shapes of certain vegetables or speculate about whether particular ingredients had aphrodisiac properties, and sometimes even sensually spoon-feed him as he sat on the counter. More often, though, Nile volunteered to help out. She loved the way the aromas of the food pervaded her hair even after the meal was over, the satisfaction of creating something that would nourish her, and especially the stories Joe told – even more so when Nicky leaned on the doorjamb and offered commentary. They had a rhythmic method of sharing anecdotes that flowed very naturally between their dual contributions of information, either because they’d told these stories dozens of times before or because their thought patterns were seamlessly synced up at this point. (Or both, most likely.)

“Nile, did I ever tell you about the time I saw a dolphin swimming in the canals of Venice?”

Nile stopped tearing the stems off spinach leaves for a moment. “What? Did you really?”

Nicky shook his head fondly. “He didn’t.”

“I did!” Joe insisted, pointing a wooden spoon at Nicky. “It was late at night –”

“He couldn’t see very well –”

“The moon was out!”

“A half moon. Waning half moon.”

“I had a lantern, too!”

“We did not! I was there, do you remember?”

“Yes, but we had a lantern, you’re forgetting. And I looked at the water and I swear I saw a shape –”

“A boat.”

“It had a fin!”

“He’d had too much at the tavern that night,” Nicky told Nile conspiratorially.

“Are you sure it wasn’t a mermaid?” Nile asked Joe in a playful tone.

He sighed heavily. “Not both of you. No faith, in this home of mine.”

“There are no dolphins in Venice, love of mine,” said Nicky, affectionately patting his behind.

“There are dolphins in the Mediterranean, and sometimes they swim up the canals. It’s true!”

“Mm-hmm.”

Joe harrumphed but still accepted a kiss on the cheek. They’d had this exact conversation dozens of times, Nile could tell. The thought made her feel happy in some deep part of her, and safe, strangely enough. She popped a spinach leaf in her mouth and savored the hearty green taste.

Over the next few days, Joe recruited Nile to help him make an ice cream cake. They baked the cake itself – simple, pleasingly golden – and they mixed cinnamon and honey into vanilla ice cream, and then they kept mixing the ice cream until it was more cream than ice and they spread it into the bottom half of two cake pans, filling the rest of each with half of the cake. They left these in the freezer overnight and then ran warm water over the cake pans’ metallic exterior so they could remove the now-frozen ice cream cake halves and stack them on top of each other with a layer of sautéed and cinnamon-and-sugared apple slices in between. Today, they’d made frosting with even more cinnamon and vanilla and honey and then with nutmeg and a hint of lemon, and they were spreading it over the top and sides of the cake along with some shimmering golden bead-shaped candies Joe had found at the bakery. (Nile was fairly certain he’d decided to make the cake for the express purpose of using the candies.)

“Nicky will be so pleased with this cake. He loves apples.”

Nile hummed in an acknowledgment as she whisked yellow food dye into a separate bowl of frosting, which they were going to use to pipe lettering onto the top of the cake. It was a blazingly sunny day outside – brilliant panels of light from the windows painted the apartment floors, and the sky outside was almost aggressively blue. She was grateful to be sequestered in the cool, shady kitchen. “What are we going to write on this cake?” she asked.

Joe made a thoughtful noise, resting one hip against the counter. He was wearing a floral apron that barely fit over his muscular torso. “Let’s write ‘Nicky’ on it.”

Nile arched an eyebrow, lips twitching. “Just… ‘Nicky’? Nothing else?”

“Okay, we’ll write, ‘Nicky and Nile’, then.”

“Why are we not including your name?”

He spread his hands as if envisioning a banner. “‘Nicky, Nile, and Joe!’”

“And Andy?”

“‘Nicky, Nile, and Joe, and Andy!’”

Nile snickered, dipping her finger into the yellow frosting for a taste. “We’re just going to write our own names on the cake? For no real reason?”

“Well, it is our cake,” he said, smoothing the white frosting with a knife that looked like it hadn’t been originally intended for kitchen use. “I wanted to make this cake for Nicky, especially. He is fond of desserts. I remember when we went to La Mallorquina in Madrid, back when it first opened…” He launched into an anecdote about a visit to what would eventually become the most renowned bakery in Spain, replete with overly verbose descriptions of Nicky’s pleased facial expressions as well as the flattering outfit he’d been wearing that day. “High-waisted trousers were all the rage in the 1890’s, and I had no complaints, because when Nicky wore them they most exquisitely displayed his –”

“Are you boring our Nile with more of your stories?” Nicky said, wandering in from the laundry area. Nile was relieved at the interruption; Joe had demonstrated on multiple occasions that any concern he might’ve once had about other people knowing the sordid details of his love life had faded away several hundred years ago. (Or, as Nile was beginning to suspect, he may have just always been like that.) (Within days of arriving, she’d bought earplugs from the pharmacy because she didn’t trust the apartment’s lack of soundproof walls.)

“My love,” Joe exclaimed, taking his hand and pulling him into a waltz-like hold. “I have been eagerly awaiting your arrival.”

Nicky had been in the other room ironing clothes for the last half-hour or so. Nile smiled to herself.

“We’re almost finished with our cake. Wanna try the frosting?” She turned to Nicky, offering him a spoon.

“I chose these ingredients in your honor,” Joe said, watching as Nicky tasted the frosting. “Honey for your sweetness, vanilla for your gentleness, cinnamon for the subtle fire in your spirit, lemon for your wit, and nutmeg because you are down-to-earth. The cake is as golden as your heart. And the apples? Your rosy cheeks,” Joe finished, cupping one of them with a hand.

“Apples are my favorite fruit,” Nicky said to Nile. “The finest ones I have ever tasted –”

“Were from trees in a walled garden in Provence, yes, I remember too,” said Joe, smiling at Nicky like he was a movie he wanted to watch all day.

“What should we write on the cake? With frosting?” Nile asked Nicky.

He looked at the ceiling, biting his lip consideringly. “What do people usually write on cakes?” he finally asked.

“‘Happy Birthday’, usually, I think,” Nile said. “Where I come from, anyway.”

“Is it your birthday, Nile?” Joe asked. Nicky watched as he delicately placed golden beads in an array along the sides of the cake.

“I – no, it isn’t,” she said, surprised. Her birthday was in May – a Taurus, her mother had always said. She herself was a Pisces which, according to her, explained her moodiness and her love of watercolors. And now Nile was thinking about the cheap set of paints she’d gotten for her mother’s birthday from the clearance bin at Target when she was in middle school, and the painting her mother had subsequently made of the sunset sky over the top of the adjacent apartment building, and the way her mother always paid attention to the colors in the sky, no matter what was going on on the ground. Celaje – the Spanish word for colors in the sky, which she’d learned last week from the Spanish dictionary Andy had loaned her. How was her mother coping from her grief? Did she still paint? Did she still look up at the heavens? How often did she think about Nile –

“Nile?” Nicky asked, concerned. “Are you all right?”

Nile realized she’d been whipping the yellow frosting into a frenzy. She carefully set the whisk down on the countertop, feeling like she was a parachute landing in a windstorm, winding her way to earth in fits and starts. “Yeah, I’m… I just zoned out, for a minute there.”

Nicky and Joe looked at her, saying nothing. Something about their eyes told her that they knew what she was feeling, somehow. When you were a thousand years old you’d seen everything.

“I think I know what to write on the cake,” Nicky remarked mildly.

‘Excelsior,’ they wrote. Onward and upward.

The cake was delicious. Nicky fed pieces of it to Joe like they were grooms at a wedding and Joe kept probably-intentionally getting frosting in his beard and saying that Nicky needed to ‘lick it off’ and Nile laughed despite herself and the heaviness was still in her heart but it felt lighter now, just a little bit. The sun shone through the window.

When Joe and Nicky weren’t paying attention, she pinched the edge of the tablecloth with her fingers and tried to breathe.

&

Cádiz had three main beaches. Playa de la Victoria, located to the south of the old city wall and adjacent to high-rise apartments and busy commercial streets, was the most popular and consequently the most crowded, with its sprawling volleyball pitches and bustling beachside bars. Playa Santa Maria, which hugged the border between the old and new parts of town, plunged off the sheer face of sand-colored stone ramparts onto flat sand that rolled out like silk into crashing waves beloved by amateur surfers.

Nicky and Joe’s favorite was Playa la Caleta, which lay in the northernmost and oldest part of town, where the sand spit flung itself outward into the Atlantic. Sun-faded fishing boats lined the peers, impossibly tall palm trees swayed in the ocean wind above stone platforms where couples kissed on benches and children peered eagerly out at the sea, wandering hippies sold handmade jewelry for a bargainable price. A whitewashed archway marked the beginning of a very old-looking stone pathway that wound its way out over the sea to a distant, tiny island – el Castillo de San Sebastián, the martyr beloved by gay men, where a lonely lighthouse released an eerie, rotating beam into the darkness by night. At low tide the outer boundaries of the pathway revealed sea-washed rocks rising from the foaming turquoise surf, where you could climb down for a somewhat risky swim. And at high tide that same surf crashed over the ancient guardrail and sprayed you with saltwater if you didn’t step carefully.

Since Andy was around for the day, the four of them elected to spend the afternoon at the beach. Andy somehow managed to still look aloof and badass in swim trunks and a sports bra, carrying the drinks cooler under one arm as her sandals flipped and flopped with each step – they were slightly too big for her, being Joe’s. Joe and Nicky, for their part, wore what appeared to be matching sunglasses and matching trunks. “Sometimes we just save time and buy two of things,” Nicky had clarified when Nile remarked on it.

Nile had picked out a cotton-candy-blue bikini from a trendy fashion retailer down the block from Nicky and Joe’s apartment. It had been years since she’d worn anything like this – there hadn’t been many opportunities to go swimming in Chicago, and then even fewer in the military, and when there had been a need she’d always chosen practical swimwear. But she was immortal now. Maybe she could be silly and self-indulgent. Especially when Nicky and Joe both exclaimed over how lovely she looked and even Andy cracked a pleased smile.

Of course, most of Joe’s praise was reserved for Nicky. “No one has ever looked more beautiful in the sun,” he proclaimed, after making all four of them stop walking so he could admire his partner.

“You’re such a flatterer,” Nicky said fondly, reaching to pinch his hip.

“I’m a truth-teller,” Joe replied magnanimously.

“Where do you guys want to set our stuff down?” Andy asked, glancing around for a suitable spot on the sand.

Fortunately, the beach wasn’t too crowded today, likely because it was fairly windy. La Levante, the famous Mediterranean easterly wind, blew particularly strongly through the Strait of Gibraltar and according to local legend it made everyone in town act strange, not unlike a full moon. Nicky said this was why Joe had been singing in the shower lately, especially around twilight while Nicky and Nile read books in the living room with fan thrumming in the dim evening light. They made eye contact, lips twitching, as soon as they heard the first strains of an Egyptian folk ballad or 1920’s torch song. “Does he do this a lot?” Nile whispered. “Yes, but usually not this loud,” Nicky giggled. “I’ll go in there and tell him to quiet down.” (He did so, and Joe stopped singing but Nicky also didn’t return from the bathroom.)

After they laid down their towels and took out their quickly-condensing bottles of tinto de verano – a popular Spanish soft drink that was essentially red wine and soda – Nicky and Joe ran out to the water to go swimming. Nile could see them splashing each other in the distance from where she and Andy reclined in the sun.

Nile looked sidelong at Andy. With her dark sunglasses and dark demeanor, she shouldn’t have looked like she belonged at this beach, but the sun ignited auburn tones in her hair and warmed her face in a way that had a sort of… softening effect. She looked less like a warrior and more like a person.

“How are you liking living with them?” Andy asked.

Nile shrugged. “It’s nice. They’re very… happy.”

Andy chuckled. “Yeah, funny, isn’t it? Pretty different vibe from me and Booker.”

“I mean…” Nile wasn’t sure what to say.

“The immortality doesn’t weigh on them, I think,” Andy said, staring out at the two laughing figures in the sky-blue sea. Her expression was complicated. “They just take each day for what it is. They like being alive. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.” She sighed and rested back on her elbows. “I used to feel like that, too. Back in the day.” With Quynh, she didn’t add. But Nile heard it nonetheless.

“You’ll feel like that again,” Nile assured her. But how could she be certain? Her stomach tingled uncomfortably.

Andy shrugged. “Maybe.” And then she turned to Nile, arching an eyebrow. “And you? Do you feel like that?”

Nile dug her toes into the sand. She thought about how long Nicky and Joe had been alive. How much they’d seen – all the cruelty they’d witnessed, the friends they’d lost, the dark and gruesome history that had unfolded before their eyes on an exponentially escalating scale. She thought about how different the world today was from the world of their youth, and how terrifying that must be to consider, like standing at the edge of an unending precipice. She thought about their violent meeting and their complicated past and their uncertain future: they didn’t know if they might die forever at any moment or if they’d keep on living for centuries more, and she thought about how both prospects might feel daunting for different reasons. She thought about grocery shopping with Nicky. She thought about Joe’s cake. She could kind of hear Joe laughing from here as Nicky splashed him.

“I don’t think so, yet,” she said. “But I could, maybe. Someday.”

“You got a whole lotta somedays ahead of you, kid.”

“A lot can happen.”

“Yeah.” Andy’s face darkened slightly.

“A lot of good,” Nile added. It occurred to her that it sounded like something Nicky might say, and she felt proud of herself for saying it and for thinking it.

Andy smiled in a way that was almost approving. “You might be right.”


	2. Pink + White

“It won’t ever get old, not in my soul”  
\- Frank Ocean, ‘Thinkin Bout You’

Nile would never consider herself a connoisseur of anything in particular; she found the elitism deeply disagreeable. But if there was one thing she was gourmet-picky about, it was music. She considered her tastes elevated by aesthetic appreciation and founded upon a basis of emotional truth, and she tended to fall into the unflattering habit of assuming no one’s recommendations were as good as hers. There was one genre her brother had shown her that she’d happily incorporated into her lifestyle, though.

“What is… bard… core?” Nicky asked uncertainly.

Nile gently pushed his hand aside so she could type in the YouTube web address. “It’s like… modern songs, but medieval style? Like, they’re played with medieval instruments, and sometimes they change the lyrics. Here, let me show you.”

There was an impulse she sometimes had when sharing a piece of media with someone, to unconsciously recreate the precise conditions under which it had been shared with her, in the hopes that this person would have the same emotional response to it that she did, at which point she could then feel personally responsible for a mild source of joy in their life. Nile felt this as she clicked through bardcore compilation playlists on YouTube. She wanted to play the songs her brother had played for her, in the order he had played them, and she wanted to repeat his jokes with the same cadence that he had used. It was as if in this moment time was circular, and she was her brother, and Nicky was her, and they were together again in a sort of backwards, bittersweet way.

“I thought you might like this, because… you know…”

“I’m old?” Nicky prompted, a light smirk on his lips. Nile laughed, feeling like there wasn’t any point in disagreeing.

As the first song played – a pop ballad that Nile normally couldn’t stand but found hilarious in this context – a smile slowly spread across Nicky’s face. He arched an eyebrow. “It doesn’t sound like the music I grew up with,” he admitted, “but it is funny, yes?”

Nile nodded, heart fluttering in her chest. “Wanna hear another one?”

They played some more songs, Nile laughing at the badly conjugated Shakespearean English and Nicky musing about the instruments people used to play when he was young, which led to him explaining to Nile what a hurdy-gurdy was, which led them down a rabbit-hole of watching hurdy-gurdy videos. It was an odd instrument with an odder name, but Nile loved the mystical aura of the sound.

“The cat is here!” Joe yelled from somewhere else in the apartment. That sentence didn’t make any sense to Nile so she initially failed to react to it.

“Oh, the cat is here,” Nicky said softly to Nile, nudging her arm as if she might not have heard Joe.

“The… cat?”

“Yes, the cat,” Nicky said, standing up from his chair. He didn’t offer any further clarification. “Can you get some salami from the kitchen?”

Nile had lived with them long enough by now that she knew there was no point in asking either of them to explain anything. She dutifully opened the fridge and looked around until she found a package of sliced sausage, and then followed Nicky into the master bedroom.

Joe crouched on the balcony, his dark curls lit fiery gold in the morning sunlight. The sky was blue as a dream and the air was warm, although a light, crisp breeze hinted that the summer was waning, not waxing.

It took Nile a moment to notice the small tabby sniffing his fingers. It was the sort of cat that was maybe gray, or maybe brown, or maybe no color in particular. Its eyes were striking, though – radiant yellow-green. Joe glanced up at them and smiled, his expression further brightening at the sight of the food Nile carried. “Oh, good, you have a snack for her!”

Nicky tore off a piece of salami and offered it to the cat, crouching next to Joe. “Here you go, cat. Have a taste,” he said politely, as though he were addressing a dinner guest. Nile’s lips twitched.

Pleased to have been fed, the cat purred and melted, rolling onto its back on the sun-warmed stone. Its whiskers sparkled faintly. “How did this cat get up here? We live on the third floor,” she pointed out, mildly confused.

“The second floor, if you believe the Europeans,” Nicky said.

“Which I don’t,” Joe remarked.

“The point remains…” Nile leaned on the wrought-iron railing, looking for a possible of mode of entrance. All she saw were window boxes loaded with succulents and hanging wires loaded with lingerie. Had it climbed up the gutter? Could cats do that?

“We don’t know how she gets here. She just does.” Nicky fed the cat another piece of meat and she purred louder.

“She’s sort of our pet, except she doesn’t live here, and only visits very occasionally so that we can feed her. Maybe she’s more like our child who left for university.”

Nicky chuckled. The cat stood and smoothed her fur against his leg.

Nile leaned against the railing. The sounds of kids playing in the street echoed distantly from somewhere to her left. “What’s her name?”

Joe paused from petting the cat to frown thoughtfully. “…We never gave her one. Habibi, should we give her a name?”

Nicky hummed noncommittally. “It might be nice.”

They were all quiet for a moment as they each tried to think of a good name. (Except for the cat, who continued purring.)

“What about Andy?” Joe said suddenly, voice tinged with mirth.

“Andy?” Nile asked, arching an eyebrow.

“She’s not here, so this cat can be her surrogate,” Nicky clarified, as if he and Joe spoke and thought from the same hive mind. The cat bumped her nose against his hand, tacitly signaling her satisfaction with this concept.

Andy looked at the cat and thought about how much her mother loved cats. And the thought made her sad, the way thinking about her mother always did. But for the first time in months, it was less of a stabbing pain and more the soreness of an old bruise.

She sighed and softly and bent to stroke the cat’s fur, which was very silky. The cat probably owed her health to Nicky and Joe’s care, she thought.

&

Nicky and Joe were dancers. Not in the professional sense, obviously. Or even really in the hobbyist sense. They’d never been formally trained as far as Nile knew – although then again, they might’ve been, because when you were almost a thousand years old you had to have had years here and there when you tried something different. They were dancers in the sense that they simply liked to dance, and their level of technical skill or adherence to choreographic tradition never seemed to particularly concern them. When one of them returned from a long errand, the other would draw him from the door into an impromptu waltz. Any song playing – buskers on street corners with accordions and violins, the drifting melody of a downstairs neighbor’s radio, the tinny hold music during protracted calls with the cable company – was a golden opportunity for kinesthetic improvisation. And apparently random evenings were designated as ‘dance nights’, generally with little to no prior notice.

Nile didn’t really dance. Her younger brother had gone through a fairly intense breakdancing phase, and she could still remember the basic properties of the moves he’d attempted to teach her, although she doubted she could still do them. (On the other hand, maybe she could do them even better now that she didn’t need to be cautious about injuring herself.)

In high school she’d only attended one formal dance – her senior Prom. After skipping every Homecoming, every TOLO, even turning down an offer to attend senior Prom as a junior from a boy in her math class that she barely knew, she figured she might as well experience the thing once before losing the chance forever.

Her desk in third-period physics class was right next to Melissa Ramirez, with her absurdly long lashes and her robin’s egg acrylics, her siren smile and her scorching reputation as a boy-killer. I’m not a boy, Nile had thought. Other girls often labeled her as cruel and shallow, but Nile sometimes wondered if they were merely jealous; Melissa chatted with her every morning and once offered her a sip of the tea-lemonade she carried around in a thermos. In quiet moments when no one could see her, Nile allowed herself to imagine that somehow, miraculously, she and Melissa would attend the Prom together. What a twist, everyone would say. She could imagine the photo on social media – she would be kissing Melissa’s cheek, and Melissa would be laughing, eyes turned from the camera, as if warmed by a private joke only the two of them understood.

Of course, Nile and Melissa did not go to the Prom together. Several boys asked Melissa to be their date, and her decision process became a red-hot topic of gossip. Nile ended up swept into a group that was mostly composed of detritus from other groups, constantly plagued by petty arguments over which restaurant they would go to for dinner. Although nobody ever directly asked her to be their date, it was sort of implicitly understood that she ‘corresponded’ with Connor, who’d shared an English class with her last year and had the sort of face that her brain refused to memorize. Melissa walked into the venue on the arm of her ex-boyfriend, with whom she was presumably getting back together. She glittered like an angel.

In the loud darkness Connor tried to dance with her, but it felt so wrong to her somehow, like their bodies were puzzle pieces that weren’t supposed to fit together, and her hands didn’t know what purpose they were meant for, and her heart was beating for the wrong reasons. She spent the second half of the dance slipping away from him by repeatedly pretending she needed to use the bathroom or look for someone or ‘get some air’. Not her proudest moment. She recalled catching glimpses of Melissa in chinks of light between moving silhouettes – even in the dimness, she somehow glowed, as though there were a spotlight shining on her specifically. Her hands seemed to know exactly what purpose they were meant for, and her body fit with her date’s in such a logical and sensible way that it put everyone around them at ease. Nile’s heart beat for different reasons now, though she didn’t know if they were wrong or right.

Her life had been mostly devoid of dancing, since then. Up until now.

“Dance with us, Nile!” Joe exclaimed, as an instrument that sounded vaguely like a hurdy-gurdy wheedled from their dinosaur of a boombox and Nicky pulled her by the wrist into some sort of three-person contra dance that should have been awkward and yet somehow wasn’t. There was no one watching them, and the room was bright and warm, and everything was a blur of their joyful expressions and wild laughter. She didn’t exactly know how to move, but her body seemed to, once she let go of her attempts to control it. The Prom was so long ago, so alien to this. This was just happiness. This was just fun.

After some unknown length of time, Nile distantly heard the phone ring from the kitchen and she pulled away, panting out laughter and half-collapsing against the counter. Something slower was playing now, and the sun had sunk below the skyline, painting the walls in shades of coral and lavender and flickering candlelight from the long blue tapers on the dining room table. She hopped up onto the counter, resting her back against the cabinets and heaving a deep breath before picking up the phone. The boombox played something slow and Balkan and vaguely haunting now; Joe and Nicky were doing what appeared to be a kind of probably-ancient folk dance that involved a lot of moving their feet in specific patterns on the floor while locked in sultry eye contact.

“Hello?” said a familiar voice. Nile’s mouth lifted in a tired smile.

“Andy’s on the phone!” Nile called into the living room. Nicky and Joe didn’t respond, because they were deeply engrossed in the controlled intimacy of traditional courtship rituals. “They’re busy being weird,” she whispered into the speaker as she watched them hold their palms up just far enough apart that the magnetism was almost visible.

“Oh, are they eating with intense eye contact?”

“No, they’re dancing with intense eye contact –”

“Oh yeah, they do that too. It’s not as weird as when they fix each other’s hair and clothes with intense eye contact. Or when they wash and put away dishes with intense eye contact.”

Nile laughed. “They were doing that last night.”

“I don’t understand how cleaning up the kitchen is sexy. I guess everything is sexy when you’re that in love. How are you doing, kid?”

Nile sighed and leaned her head back against whitewashed wood, twisting the retro spiral telephone cord around her finger. “I’m doin’,” she said. It was her joking response for when she didn’t want to give a depressing answer. But even as she said it she realized… she was actually doing okay. Fine, even.

Maybe even better than fine.

“I’m… having fun,” she said, because it was true, at least in this moment. The candlelight flickered on the walls as the evening shadows stretched longer, and Nicky laughed as Joe pretended to swoon against him.

Andy didn’t say anything for a moment. “Oh – good,” she said, sounding uncharacteristically startled.

“I mean, like… we all just danced tonight. And man, I didn’t even know I liked dancing,” she admitted, a little ruefully.

Andy sighed, and even through the phone, it sounded fond. “I’m glad. I really am.” This is what I hoped for, she didn’t say. But Nile heard it.

“You should come around more often. You know, we named a cat after you.”

“A – what?”

“A stray cat that comes by,” Nile chuckled. “We named her Andy, because she comes and goes. You should meet your namesake. Or would you be her namesake?”

“Do you think I know? I can barely keep up with Modern English. Everyone needs to stop inventing new languages every century or so.”

“Isn’t the opposite happening? I thought languages kept giving into each other. Doesn’t another one die every day, or something?”

“I hope English is next,” Andy said darkly, and Nile snorted. “Bastard language. Not really Latin, not really German, not really French. I miss Liburnian. Now that was a solid language.”

Nile’s brow furrowed, a laugh still caught in her throat. “Liburnian – is that a real language? Did you just make that up?”

“Of course it’s real. Well – it was. The only people who spoke it were alive two thousand years ago in southern Croatia.”

“Well, say something in it, then. If it’s so great.”

Andy did. Nile had to admit that it did sound rather lyrical and atmospheric, especially with twilight deepening and a bouzouki reel playing in the living room.

“What did you say?” she asked, tone softer now.

“I said, ‘I’ll come by more often to see you guys.’”

Nile grinned even though no one was looking at her. “Good.”

“I lied – I actually just said nonsense. I don’t remember how to speak Liburnian anymore.” Andy’s tone was playful, but there was something underneath it. Something flat and gray, like slate.

“Did you lie about coming by?”

“No. I didn’t lie about that part.” The flat and gray thing sounded farther away this time.

Nile kept smiling.

&

“This was when we were in Phuket,” Nicky says, pointing to a paper-thin photo of him and Joe standing in front of a jacaranda tree. “Look, our shirts match the flowers.”

They were indeed both wearing very vintage-looking Hawaiian shirts in complementary shades of periwinkle. They each had slightly longer and shaggier haircuts than current day, and Joe’s beard was cropped closer to his jaw, making him look strangely youthful. Their adoring expressions hadn’t changed much, though.

“Show them the one of us riding the elephant!” Joe called from the kitchen, raising his voice to be heard over the hiss of onions sizzling in a frying pan.

“We didn’t get a photo of that, my love,” Nicky called back before turning to Nile again and lowering his voice. “Now, let me show you this one from when we were trekking through the jungle in Borneo. Joe is very embarrassed about how his hair looked but I think it’s important for you to see it –”

“It’s important for me to see how his hair looked?” Nile ran her thumb along the heavy, embossed edge of the photo album.

“We did get a photo of the elephant! I distinctly remember this. It was a Polaroid!”

“We were not riding the elephant in the photo, my love! It’s not very interesting for Nile to look at.” Nicky hummed contemplatively, turning over a page. “Now, let me see if I can find that picture of Joe,” he murmured.

“Elephants are incredible creatures! I’m sure she would like to see the photo anyway!”

“Well, I don’t think we have it!” Nicky called back, not looking up as he continued to pore over the book.

“Andy took the photo!”

“Ask her then, my love,” Nicky replied absently, and made a small noise of vexation. “Do you know, I cannot find that one from Borneo. I wonder if Andy has it too…”

It was strictly against the team’s code to allow anyone to collect records of their existence – anyone except themselves, that is. Underneath Joe and Nicky’s coffee table was a pile of dusty albums stocked with select sepia photographs and daguerreotypes and a number of sketches Joe had done of Nicky over the years (including a particular album she ‘wasn’t allowed to look at’).

“Ah, Nile,” Nicky said, flipping to a new page and tapping the creamy cardstock. “Joe made these about three hundred years ago, I think. Are they not lovely?”

They were two small ovals of paper, of roughly the shape and size to be easily stored inside a locket or perhaps the lid of a pocket watch. Rendered in delicate, faded pigment were Joe and Nicky’s likenesses; Nicky’s hair was very long and Joe appeared to be wearing an elaborate hat, but their features were still recognizable. Nicky smiled to himself, running a finger around the circumference of Joe’s. “I used to carry this around with me, and look at it whenever I missed him. FaceTime is much easier, yes?”

Nile nodded wordlessly. For some reason, the images made her heart feel bruised. She was happy, and she was sad. Happysad.

Joe entered the dining room and set a plate of sauteed vegetables on the table. He sat close enough to Nicky to be literally breathing down his neck. “Ah, I remember those,” he said fondly. “FaceTime is much easier, yes?”

“I already said that, you know,” Nicky replied, lifting Joe’s hand to kiss the base of his thumb.

The two of them looked at Nile. She somehow felt the way she did when she left her bedroom curtains open and her room was in full view of the neighbors across the street – unexpectedly seen, and yet unaware of what precisely they were seeing. However, in this instance, she thought, she’d left the curtains open on purpose.

“Would you like me to make some miniature portraits of your family?” Joe asked.

Nile felt her throat swelling up, even though she didn’t fully understand what exactly was making her cry. She swallowed. “I would like that very much, I think.”

Nicky took her hand and squeezed it.

&

It took Nile an embarrassingly long time to discover the terrace. Mostly because the building residents generally used the terrace to dry their laundry, and Nile had come to an agreement with Joe and Nicky a month or two ago that if they took care of laundry, she would handle grocery shopping. (It seemed more efficient that way.) But the terrace was lovely, as a matter of fact, and she regretted not investigating it sooner.

Almost every building in Spain, it seemed, had a rooftop terrace. Most of them were really as simple as a short wall around the perimeter of the roof and a narrow, well-hidden staircase (or rickety ladder) connecting it to one of the top story rooms. The fanciest terraces were multilevel, with a garden of plants, arrangements of elegant furniture, awnings for shade and glass walls against the wind. The terrace above Joe and Nicky’s apartment revealed the odd trapezoidal shape of the building (like many buildings in Cádiz, it was squeezed into the gap left behind between a number of haphazardly intersecting streets). If you rode the ancient elevator all the way to the top, you found yourself in a secret hidden landing at the top of the stairwell, from which you could use a special key to get out onto the adobe roof and peer over the chest-height stone walls at the shady streets below. During the daytime the terrace was baked in sun, buffeted by wind, and crowded with lines of laundry lifting in the breeze like ghost garments. But by night it was empty and peaceful – perfect for stargazing.

Nile had heard of some cities having an ‘underground city’ like the catacombs below Paris, or the elaborate London tube system, or dark, dusty tunnels below Seattle that had once been the foundations of older buildings destroyed by a great fire – Andy had explained to her why the sidewalks in certain areas of downtown featured grates made of time-worn purple glass, windows to seemingly nowhere.

But if anything, Cádiz had an ‘above city’. Most of the buildings in the old part of town were only about three stories high due to the difficulty of building on sand, and so every roof terrace rose to around the same altitude. Once she was on top of the building, Nile could see a sprawl of other terraces, red and white and marked with billowing laundry and exuberant plant life and the colorful figures of people spreading out before her, all of them dozens of yards above street level and close enough together that she could almost imagine jumping from one to the next. She felt she’d discovered a secret citadel in the clouds. The only taller edifices were the old medieval watchtowers and of course the cathedral, with its enormous pearl-white dome and spires craning their necks upward toward the heavens. The sea glistened in the distance on her left, and on her right, and in front of her, and behind her too, on either side of the chrome-and-glass high-rises in the new part of town and the long stretch of isthmus that connected Cádiz to the mainland like a string of caramel, carrying a highway and railroad with it.

But the best thing about the terrace was the stars. Scattered over the jewel-dark empyrean like debris from a long-ago explosion of light, which she supposed they were. Nile was no astronomer, but she could generally identify the Big Dipper fairly quickly, and to her there was something comforting about its simple shape and reliable presence. She was so far from home right now, and yet she could still see the same constellation she’d been able to point out since childhood – the big spoon that the ancient Greeks had thought was a long-tailed bear (someday she might ask Andy if she knew what that was all about).

As if summoned by Nile’s thoughts, the door heaved and graceful footsteps clicked on the stone roof and Nile heard Andy’s unmistakable weary sigh as she lowered herself to sit next to Nile on the picnic blanket.

For a moment Nile didn’t say anything. Nothing felt particularly urgent in this city in the clouds, especially when a gentle early-autumn breeze cooled her face even as the stone below her body still held the warmth from the afternoon sun hours ago.

“I didn’t know you were here,” Nile commented.

“Came back just now. I didn’t know you were up here.”

“It’s nice.”

“It is. I come up here every night when I stay with Nicky and Joe.” Andy paused, peering thoughtfully at Nile’s Bluetooth speaker. Her irises glinted in the soft moonlight. “What’s that music playing?”

Nile hadn’t been paying attention, but she knew the melody without having to think about it; she was as attuned to it as to her own pulse. “Pink + White. Frank Ocean.”

Andy hummed and leaned back on her arms. “It’s nice.”

“It is.”

Neither of them spoke as the rhythm of the song drifted over them; it sounded the way being in a boat on calm water felt, Nile thought.

“I was thinking we might leave again,” Andy said.

Nile wasn’t sure how to respond. She took time waiting for the words to formulate in her mouth. “Yeah?”

“It’s been pleasant being here for the summer. But we have to go back to real life, eventually. Nicky and Joe, too.”

“Is this not real life?” Nile asked, arching an eyebrow, but she knew what Andy meant. No respite was eternal.

Months ago, the prospect of going back out in the great, dark void that was the world would’ve been daunting at best, truly nauseating at worst. It would’ve felt like jumping into the deep end of the pool, walking into a pitch-black room, leaving the house with nothing in her pockets. And the truth was, that feeling was still there. It was no less scary than it had been before.

The difference was that back then, fear had been her only feeling. Fear and grief, perhaps. And the fear and the grief were still there, but there were now so many other feelings too that the original two didn’t seem quite so significant. Fear looked rather lackluster when you took photos of it standing next to curiosity, determination, acceptance. Happiness. Especially happiness.

“I’m ready for that,” Nile told Andy, although Andy had not said anything else.

“We’ll be coming with you anyway,” Joe added, and Nile startled because she hadn’t heard the two of them join her and Andy on the terrace.

“Yes. All of us are going.”

The night air was chilly, but Nile’s heart radiated heat. She hugged her knees and smiled down at the rumpled blanket between her bare feet.

“Who’ll take care of the cat, though?” she eventually asked.

“She’ll be okay,” Joe assured her.

“We can bring her with us,” suggested Nicky.

“We will not be doing that,” Andy said. Her tone indicated that they’d had very similar discussions to this one hundreds of times before. Nile snickered.

The song played on. The stars wheeled overhead. ‘This is life,’ Frank Ocean crooned, ‘life, immortality.’ Nile released a contented sigh, and somehow felt rather than heard her three companions sighing in time with her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much for reading! <3
> 
> Bardcore is real and you can easily find it on youtube for free wholesome entertainment. Cadiz is also a real place and my descriptions of it are drawn from my memories of living there - it's worth a visit someday
> 
> Hope you're well <3

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Title is from the Rico Nasty song


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